posts tagged: stash

Now, it’s been bandied about that I have no stash. This isn’t entirely accurate. I have some stash. But it’s really rather small. I showed it to Lolly and Kris a few weeks ago, and Kris laughed–laughed!–when he mentally compared the basket of sock yarn and 1.5 bins of yarn I own to what he has in his house. Remember at the beginning of the year, when I declared I would reduce my stash by 1/3? Actually not all that hard to accomplish. (And yet, I don’t think I did. I reduced it by, I don’t know, maybe 1/4.)

So I was resolved to buy yarn on Saturday at Maryland Sheep and Wool and feel no guilt. And I did! I spent nearly all the cash I’d given myself to spend, and I couldn’t be happier with my purchases. The “spree” didn’t start out so well–I was so overwhelmed that I passed by a lot of great stuff. My first purchase was, naturally, sock yarn–what I identified as a good deal, from a small company that looked nice.

I finally watched this week’s episode (part 1 of the finale). The following is not a spoiler, just some Laura love:

I adore that when Tim asked for their receipts, Laura apparently had a spreadsheet. (You don’t see it in the episode at all; Tim mentions it in his podcast.) That’s the kind of thing I would have done!

There are some of you with spreadsheets cataloging all your stash–I haven’t gone that route yet. I should have made one when I did the massive stash purge, but I can do it upon move-in, I suppose! I have so little, I’m not sure it’s all that necessary, but I actually think it would be fun to do, if I had some time to devote to it.

Yesterday I sat with the stash. Well, the stash that doesn’t sit next to the couch. And you know what? I purged it like nobody’s business. There were tangled skeins not worth keeping, bulky yarns I will never want to use, and more acrylic than I’d like to admit.

I thought about making stuff available to you guys, but there was so little, really, and pretty much none of it had a label or was a full skein. It wasn’t worth anything to anybody. And now it’s gone!

I actually have a fairly small stash of yarn, though if you were to ask my boyfriend he’d have something different to say. I haven’t forced him to sit and look at bloggers’ photos of their stashes as a comparison, but trust me: I don’t have a ton of yarn that was purchased with no project in mind. For the most part, I decide on a project and buy the yarn. So I have lots of leftover bits, but never enough to make an entire something.

Until a week and a half ago, when I was inspired to buy some sock yarn “just because.” Just because it was so reasonably priced. Just because the colors were so pretty. Just because I could.

Amylovie has challenged me to reveal my whole stash here for all to see. This is a more daunting task than you might think. I’m sloppy about storing my stash, and I always know, in the back of my mind, that I really ought to go in and organize it.

About a year ago I did such an organization, but it’s time for another. So, do I take this opportunity? Do I pull everything out for a picture and then pack it away carefully? This is so terrifying an idea, and it came up on me with so little warning, that I’m going to have to stew on it. In the meantime, let me show all the spots where yarn currently lives.